The Unknown Cenotaph

The unknown cenotaph:

Private origins of a public monument

Dr David Faber 2015

Table of contents

I. Preface

II. Illustrations

III. Remembrance of things past

IV. Australian Nativism & the Dardanelles cenotaph

V. The Outbreak of the Great War & The Advertiser

VI. SA Nativism & the Australian Wattle Day League

VII. Walter Torode Master Builder

VIII. `A plan so patriotic’

IX. `It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country’

I Preface

This publication has like most of my work had a long gestation. As a freelance historian for much of my career, no institutional obligation has obliged me to be one of the publish or perish brigade, who are rushed into print only to repent at leisure.

My engagement with the Anzac legend began in infancy when a favourite Liberal voting uncle handed me a venerable comic strip apology for the Gallipoli landing. It taught me that my people had been engaged in things larger than themselves. It was in effect my Iliad. This was in the 1960s, when Australia and indeed my relations were split by the War in Vietnam. My great grandparents had been Methodist opponents of the Boer War. My Labor voting grandmother and father opposed Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, and were very concerned for a conscripted cousin who did a tour of duty there. At the age of eight I wanted to march in the Moratorium demonstration in Burnie, Tasmania, using the credibility of my Cub Scout uniform. Dad talked me out of it, fearing political surveillance and damage to my future job prospects; as Lenny Bruce said around then, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention. That year we got television, largely for my education, and I watched the Tet Offensive in the living room. I learned that modern heroes fought on their bellies, not standing up as in olden times. At that age I was still playing soldiers and reading about the British Empire. I was early implicitly aware of conflicting traditions and social and political cross currents.

In 1994 I took up residence on Adelaide’s South Terrace. Fascinated with history since the age of five, I have always taken an interest in public monuments, not least those dubbed by Professor Ken Inglis our `sacred places’ of the national cult of military commemoration. Across from my digs was a cenotaph, almost directly in front of what was then still Trades Hall. It had been a gathering point for open air union stop work meetings. A moment’s inspection established that this cenotaph was indeed of very early date.

As my enquiries broadened, the identity of the builder emerged and that of the organisation which commissioned the work, plus that of the conservative newspaper editor who publicised the initiative and that of the Governor General commemorated on the plaque, the chief imperial national recruiting officer. The physical features of the monument embodied the grieving of a community enduring an Iliad, shocked by the unprecedented human cost of the clash of arms in its first Great War. These findings were written up in a research report, here laid before the historical public on the occasion of the centenary year of the Anzac landing and the erection of the cenotaph.

In the intervening period it became apparent that this report was too long to be published as an article and too short to be published as a book. Yet the backstory laid out here in the table of contents below seemed to require integral retelling at some little length. Hence its appearance now as a booklet. It is hoped readers will agree that this form suits a story worth telling, the story of how a young nation worked itself up to participate in a great imperial adventure, and to commemorate, during its very involvement, the terrible price paid in the hope of the resumption of a just peace with honour. So began a democratic tradition of commemorating every person fallen in military service, and even every person who served at more provincial localities like Penguin on the North West Coast of Tasmania.

It should never be forgotten, though it is sometimes implicitly overlooked by an officialdom which is forced to implicitly acknowledge it by emphasising Anzac bravery, that the Gallipoli landing was a military debacle, poorly planned and badly executed. It ought to be a historical warning not to be `hell bent’, to use the phrase of Douglas Newton, on involvement in imperial adventures. I subscribe to the Honest History school of historians whose belief it is that the Anzac tradition is but one albeit important strand of Australian history, which must be analysed in a balanced way if it is not to degenerate into a militaristic recruiting myth for a sub-imperial nation which sometimes raises troops generation after generation by methods similar to the ocker sale of breakfast cereal. There was a public outcry when a grocery oligopoly put its logo to a poster and website celebrating the Anzac legend.1 The risk of conservative and commercial political exploitation of the tradition is always there, never more than in recent times with the revival of Anzac observance at a time of divisive foreign military entanglements. As early as 1928 the dissident Communist Party of Australia

was to complain by publishing a letter from `A Class-Conscious Digger’ of what the distinguished historian Humphrey McQueen was later to christen `ANZAC-ery’.2 The notion that the nation was somehow born at Anzac Cove was always propagandistic, issuing as it did from the politically interested mouth of the demagogue Billy Hughes in 1919. As if the preceding century and more of colonial history, preceded by millennia of first nations’ settlement, had left no mark upon us. And the spectacle of the bravery of the Anzac generation being once again romanticised to sell newspapers in this centenary year is disturbing.3

Speaking of newspapers, specifically The Advertiser and The Register, a further structural word is warranted on this paper’s coverage of their coverage of the outbreak of the Great War and the inauguration of the Dardanelles Cenotaph respectively. A precis of this paper was published by Honest History under the editorial hand of colleague David Stephen. When published I was startled to find the checked quotations referred to The Advertiser, which I had somewhat overlooked, rather than The Register, whose editor had been a central figure in the selling of the memorial to the public. I considered revising that section of this paper and researched so doing, but found that except for minor details the two accounts were very substantially corroborative. Had I accommodated these variorum readings of the inauguration I felt that I would need to write another section to be entitled `On Wattle Day Eve’ on how the war had been covered in early September 1915 by the Adelaide press to define what was in the minds of those who participated in the inauguration. I found during this exercise that the question of how the outbreak of war had been covered needed to be canvassed. Aware of the tendency for the bulk of the paper to grow under my hand and its already long gestation, I decided to analyse one rendition of one topic for each newspaper. Readers of the contemporary Adelaide press may of course have read both newspapers simultaneously. Perhaps I or another writer will return to a less selective analysis in the future. The upshot was the finding that press coverage could not account for the deep motivation of community response to the July Crisis, which responded to underlying culture decades in the preparation by State and establishment.

The opportunity for a constructively critical reading of the Australian popular military tradition of volunteer, conscript and professional service should be seized and must

be seized during the centenary years of the Great War to prevent vested interests further militarising our society for their own anti-democratic ends. In focusing in detail on one nationally significant South Australian moment of our complex national cult of commemoration, this study hopes to contribute to that end. But if as a proud child of the protesting 1960s and 70s and an anti-conscriptionist I reject militarism, I equally reject scorning a tradition of a democracy armed by volunteers mobilised against imperialism and fascism. To do so would be wrong and impolitic self-isolation from popular tradition.

I have a number of intellectual debts to repay which underscore the approach taken in this work. The first is to Bill Gammage, under whom I had the privilege of studying Australian history at the University of Adelaide as an undergraduate in 1981. His famous The Broken Years taught me that the Anzac tradition could be approached respectfully in a properly humanistic way rather than as an exercise in jingoism. Patsy Adam-Smith’s The Anzacs is likewise valuable. Reynolds & Lake’s provocative What’s Wrong With Anzac? was a wake-up call after my own heart, for all its arguable limitations. Two British works have structured my over-arching approach to the Dardanelles Cenotaph as a monument to the history and politics of commemoration. They are Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning and Alex King’s Memorials of the Great War in Britain. Both emphasise the complexity of this civic cult. King in particular emphasises the local politics which shaped each memorial, as I have done here. My general approach of historical materialism has been shaped by the Oxford Anglican historical idealist Robin George Collingwood, a civilian survivor of the Great War at that ancient academy, and the socialists Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci. I would also like here to thank Professor Inglis for reviewing an early draft of this work. Responsibility for any errors is of course mine alone. I would also like to thank here Mr Bill Denny AM of the RSL and Mr Kyle Penick of the Adelaide Parklands Preservation Society for their contributions and support. Mr Andrew McClean is to be thanked for technical assistance. Ms Margaret Hoskings, History Subject Librarian at the University of Adelaide Library, traditionally known as the Barr Smith, is also to be thanked for her interest in this work. Thanks are also due to Mr Robert Thornton MA, Archivist at the Adelaide City Council Archives. Not to be forgotten neither are the staff of the State Library, whose newspaper collection has proven invaluable to me as to every South Australian historian, and who were always there to help this technologically challenged patron wrangle with the

microfilm printer. Last but not least to be thanked is my personal friend Ms Jennifer Colmer, who has been a daily source of encouragement and a stylistic mentor.

As to minor matters of style and referencing I have followed my own leanings as this is a stand-alone publication.

Dr David Faber, Flinders University SA Adelaide September 2015

II List of illustrations from The Advertiser September 1915

1. The booksellers Rigby’s of King William Street marketed with the recommendation of WM Hughes the Report of the British Committee on GERMAN OUTRAGES as `The Great Recruiting Book’ the day before the inauguration of the Dardanelles Cenotaph. 2. The advertising hooks of fear and love were to the fore in an advertisement for life saving field glasses and compass sets marketed by an enterprising optician and optometrist of King William Street the day after the Cenotaph was inaugurated. 3. A `Physical Culture Institute’ in Currie Street near the Recruiting Office advertised `Chest improvement’ to INTENDING AND REJECTED RECRUITS 8 September 1915 4. Even advertisers whose merchandise had nothing to do with military purposes latched on to war psychology to vend their wares: While Our Boys are Collaring the Dardanells (sic) Let Us Collar You. 8 September 1915 5. The `Roll of Honour’ Icon from The Advertiser of 8 September 1915 and an adjacent headline indicating that some of the truth of the horror of war did emerge in the press alongside propagandistic promotion of the imperial cause. 6. An account of an Australian assault at Gallipoli by CEW Bean, one of the prime authors of the fame of Anzac, published 8 September 1915

III Remembrance of things past

A war memorial stands unobtrusively at the heart of the well-groomed Lundie Gardens, situated at the western end of Adelaide’s South Terrace. It is a cenotaph crowned by a cross which is generally ignored in the steady ebb and flow of local life, as public monuments tend to be everywhere. Not until recently were Wattle Day observances resumed before it, principally due to the efforts of veterans’ exponent Bill Denny AM.4

Yet a moment’s attention to its three epigraphs immediately suggests that it must be one of the first Australian monuments consecrated to the memory of citizens who fell in the Great War. Honour boards had begun to appear to the dead as early as 24 May, the first Anzac casualty lists having shocked the nation on 3 May.5 Of course in Europe a million combatants had been immolated by Xmas 1914, and stone memorials were already being erected in Britain by 1915.6 Improvised floral street shrines were appearing in Stepney and other London localities during 1914.7 Even so, the Dardanelles Cenotaph is an early exemplar of the symbolism and politics of remembrance in the Anglosphere.

The ledge of the cenotaph’s abacus bears a dedication inclusive of our New Zealand bretheren to `Australasian soldiers’. The moulding beneath memorialises the date of the landing at Anzac Cove in the `Dardanelles’. Clearly, as Professor Inglis notes in his Sacred Places, this cenotaph was erected before reference to Gallipoli and the expeditionary corps became ritualised.8 Indeed a brass plaque fixed to the pedestal of the obelisk records that it was `unveiled by His Excellency the Governor General Sir R. Munro Ferguson, Wattle Day Sept 7th 1915.’9 The following day the Adelaide Register reported His Excellency as declaring that `this initiative had caused Adelaide to be the first city in the Commonwealth to erect a memorial to the landing of the troops on Gallipoli.’10 Professor Inglis acknowledges that what we may designate as the Dardanelles Cenotaph was the first erected to Australia’s Great War dead, citing the Lord Mayor of Adelaide to that effect.11

It is an irony liable to delight an historian’s heart that such an historic site of the cult of remembrance which has bulked so large in the national culture fell for so long into oblivion. As early as 1935 The Advertiser described it as `a war memorial…which, judging by its appearance, is almost forgotten.’12 The purpose of this pamphlet is to chart the intentions with which the cenotaph was built and inaugurated, and their relation to the functions it performs today.

IV. Australian Nativism & the Dardanelles Cenotaph

The Dardanelles Cenotaph was projected by the Wattle Day League, a nation building ladies’ auxiliary of the Australian Natives’ Association.13 Whilst the historical importance of the ANA is generally recognised, it is only with a punctual recapitulation of the outlook of the ANA that we can understand how naturally exponents of the Wattle Day League came to propose the erection of a modest obelisk in recognition of the Australians who had fallen and were falling upon Gallipoli.

As reported by the official centenary historian of the ANA, JE Menadue,14 `the…Association by its laws and rules…[was] representative of all levels of society.’15 Constitutionally cross sectional and anti-sectarian,16 the Association was a friendly society which aimed to finance the social advancement of native born Australians with the resources of mutual aid,17 during an era in which only a minimum of legal and socioeconomic toleration was accorded trade union organisation. As Menadue very pertinently recalls, in the period prior to the institution of the Association, `all other combinations of workers were suppressed’. Friendly societies flourished in 19th century Australia partly as an outlet for suppressed proletarian solidarity.18

By the same token ANA officials were commonly from the good side of the tracks and distinguished for professional or cultural leadership and ability in financial administration.19 The middle class aspirations for self-determination of these bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectuals and professionals, organic in Gramscian terms to the functional requirements of their class,20 expressed themselves in enlightened self interest and a duty to charity and self-help, manifest as `a deep seated desire in the minds of the rising tide of Australian born citizens, that something more should be done to relieve distress in the community, that more should be done to advance the cause of their homeland and that the task must be shouldered to a greater degree by native born citizens.’21

The Association was politically rather than temperamentally moderate, a feisty if non- partisan creature of the democratic centre-left, feuding with conservatives for Australia First rather than a republic. In South Australia it came to embrace distinguished exponents of all vocations and professions, excluding those of the lower-middle and working classes. The majority of the membership was indeed of the progressive radical liberal bloc, and as such `showed a strong reluctance to hand the country over to the Trade Unions’.22 A society of all the talents, reminiscent of the meritocracy first mooted by the pioneer nativist WC Wentworth,23 the Association was quintessentially a class institution, aggregating and mobilising social peers with diverse vocations, outlooks and loyalties to exercise collective influence in the name of a common interest in an emerging nationalism.24

With the rise of the Labor Party, the Association had competition from the trade unions on the centre-left. Indeed by the end of the Great War, The South Australian Register, edited by prominent Native William Sowden, was described by its competitor The Truth as `the official organ of the Tory party’.25 `Don’t Hurry the Millenium’ was Sowden’s watchword, and he worried that high wages and easy conditions were associated with `increasing friction between employer and employee’. `Property, the fruits of …industry, ought not to be considered the enemy of the commonwealth’ he opined, warning of `the disquieting signs of the times – lawlessness, anarchy, the lack of discipline.’ It was a malaise against which he felt the Boy Conscription the Association had promoted might prove corrective.26 These convictions determined the Association’s conformist stance concerning war and peace in the age of the crisis of imperialism.27 One contemporary West Australian official source claimed very plausibly that `the boys who marched away in 1914 to save the British Empire…did so cheerfully because they had learnt the virtue of patriotic self-sacrifice from teachers, school books and Empire Day rituals’.28 Certainly for many of the Great War generation the motives for enlistment were constituted by masculine expectations which were second nature and hard to conceptualise to the succeeding post-war generation.29 `Boys had been groomed for decades to become the soldiers that many predicted their Empire would eventually require.’30

In rationalising its Nativism in conformity with mainstream cultural constraints, the ANA with some justice traced its antecedents back to associations regulated by Alfred the Great,31 and considered itself as such to be an expression of a peculiarly English movement

`closely related to the discovery of Australia in 1770 by Captain James Cook’.32 The ANA effectively saw itself as being as British as beefsteak and as Australian as The Endeavour in this outpost of empire in the antipodes.

The implications of this strain of populist racial pride was early exemplified in South Australia in the Big Englander jingoism which greeted the Jamison Raid and the Boer War.33 Altogether `anglo-saxonism, race pride and close attachment to the Queen abounded’ among the Natives.34 Even so the Association was early decried as an alien coven of republican upstarts. As late as 1892 President WJ Sowden of the South Australian Branch of the ANA `felt it his responsibility to reply…[to these] insupportable attacks’ despite the fact that the ANA had nothing to do with `plotters against the Throne and Her Majesty’. The Natives he continued were constitutional monarchists, equally in disfavour with `the Republican Bulletin and the Imperialistic Argus.35 But the distinction as between Nativism and imperialism could not long survive the call of ethnicity. The Association’s nationalism was ethnic as well as institutional. Indeed they gloried in a Sydney Morning Herald report of their 1902 Anniversary Banquet, which stated that within their ranks `the pulse of the native born beats in harmony with the traditions of the race to which they are proud to belong’.36

It was a pulse, indeed, which raced at a challenge, for the nascent Association felt Bismark breathing down its neck. The recent `Franco-German war clearly demonstrated that no community could afford to…repose in lethargy’. This was in an international climate of opinion which held `after 1870 that France had been defeated by the Prussian schoolteacher’. This was hardly surprising given the official German view of education as `one of the principal ways of promoting the strength of the nation and above all military strength’.37 Indeed the ANA paid the Iron Chancellor of the `classic country of barracks and schools’38 the ultimate compliment of emulation in placing `Defence and Education high up on the priorities as essential for the nation’s progress’.39 And it took the striking view that the Empire, at the height of the New Imperialism, had been complacent about preparedness.40

Even the Australian people and their first Federal government were taxed with `indifference towards national defence’.41 The ANA itself could not credibly have been

reproached with such a lax attitude. Like nativists in the United States, the ANA was concerned not to say obsessed with the fear that the ethnic nation would be weakened by dilution by alien immigrants. The Second Federal ANA Conference of 1910 resolved `to work towards the complete abolition of Asiatic labour in Australia, and to prevent undesirables from entering Australia.’42 It also exaggerated international threats in an admittedly unsafe world by viewing them through a dark, distorting, pseudo-darwinist lens.43 For these reasons, few topics were nearer to the Association’s heart than defence. It bulked large in its life nationally, provincially and locally, giving a strategic sheen to its patriotic commitment to national development. Even its calls for transcontinental railway lines referred to them primarily as military infrastructure.44

In 1900 the First ANA Federal Conference resolved `that an effort be made to instill a fuller realisation of the needs for Australia’s defence and that the various Boards of Directors be requested to impress upon their members the importance of their responsibilities in connection with the defence of the colonies’.45 So far as South Australia was concerned, the work was already well advanced. Since its formation in 1887, the Branch had repeatedly been addressed on defence topics. After it was addressed in February 1896 by the Commandant of the South Australian Defence Forces regarding `the Defence of the Colonies’, the Branch took an active view of its imperial duties in the face of French and German activities in the Pacific.46 In the person of Native Premier Charles Cameron Kingston the Branch went out of its way to support the imperial war effort in South Africa. The colonial government dispatched a small expeditionary detachment of 125,47 in which other Natives were amongst the first to enlist.48 The South Australian Register under the direction of Native William Sowden raised a quarter of a million shilling contributions.49 Nor was home defence neglected. With the approval of the Acting Commandant South Australian Defence Force, Sowden raised an ANA Rifle Corps, which was formed with a view to training and bolstering ANA membership. After being augmented it would have been augmented again had the SADF been in a position to support the increased enlistment.50 Clearly the South Australian Branch stood in little need of Federal hints on defence.

The nation however, in the view of the Association, continued its perilous slumber. And so at its Second Federal Conference in Melbourne in February 1910 it was resolved `to

20 co-operate toward the successful carrying out of the ANA Commonwealth Cadet Rifle Shooting Competition’. This proposal arose from a ferment of debate over the previous four years, after the Albert Park Branch had successfully proposed to the Victorian Board that branches discuss defence at least once each semester. Nor were these discussions ineffectual. When an ANA delegation waited on the Prime Minister to canvass compulsory military training and related topics, they were addressing in Alfred Deakin a man who was perhaps the Association’s favourite son. And local branches did not confine themselves to words. Thirty-eight of them participated in inter-branch shooting competitions in 1910.51

It is hardly surprising then that the South Australian ANA opened hostilities in August 1914 by firing off a telegram in support of the war effort. Contemporaneously the Victorian Board endorsed the dispatch of a Australian forces overseas and offered `to defray the contributions of members who may join the expeditionary forces for service outside of Victoria’. To the end of September 1915, the month in which the Dardanelles Cenotaph was inaugurated, 3,125 Natives had enlisted and 101 had been killed. Four ad won Victoria Crosses.52 The Association had picked up £6,000 in dues for members on active service.53 Clearly the wages of preparedness were glory. Thus when the South Australian Wattle Day League, an affiliate of the local ANA, proposed the erection of a cenotaph, no-one inside the Association would have demurred. There was, after all, a clear and pressing need.

V The Outbreak of the Great War & The Advertiser

When Gavrilo Princip murdered the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, The Advertiser had been edited for many years by the progressive liberal-democratic protectionist proprietor Sir John Langdon Bonython with a firm and rhetorically sapient professional hand, he having risen by talent and mining speculation from the rank of a hard working cadet reporter.54 The Bonython editorial line was mainstream but genuinely liberal, with a little dissent and diversity being allowed to peep through the pages, rather more so than the same masthead permits under the modern Murdoch dispensation. For example correspondents in the letters column were permitted to debate the politics of the syndicalist International Workers of the World,55 and even organised South Australian pacifist opinion achieved some news coverage during the war.56 The news from Europe generally took a couple of days to appear in print in Adelaide, as it did when the paper editorialised about the `Austro-Hungarian Horror.’ The approximate significance of the deaths of these royals was not lost on Bonython, who deplored them as examples of the contemporary trend of regicide.57 This was doubtless significant,58 but the main point we see with 20/20 hindsight was missed. Bonython no more foresaw a continental conflagration arising from this regional event than did the vast majority in metropolitan Europe, despite its near misses with disaster over the preceding quarter century, which had brought to a head a half century of escalating tension.59 The nub of the question was briefly alluded to on 1 July, when the paper mentioned that `the [German] Socialist [newspaper]`Vorwaerts’ considers it [the crime] shows that Austria more and more threatens the peace of Europe.’ This was an ominously prescient reference, but a reader who blinked over breakfast would have missed it.

Some Adelaide observers were however attuned to the context of tension in imperial Europe. The same day The Advertiser reported the remarks of the Reverend Dr Bevan to the annual general meeting of the South Australian branch of the International Peace Society who perspicaciously emphasised `the extraordinary military spirit which had been engendered during the last 40 or 50 years.’ The rise of the German Empire over the ashes of the French Second Empire in 1870 was associated with a thrusting Central European economic development which created an expansionary outlook and colonial aspirations. Slowly a new

European balance of power began to take shape over a course of many complicated re- alignments and the continent began to divide into two armed camps. In 1879 Bismarck struck a `middle European’ defensive alliance with the Dual Monarchy to hold off an aggrieved France, complemented by German brokering of tensions in the Balkans exacerbated by Habsburg and Romanov competition. The Kingdom of Italy threw in its lot with them, forming the Triple Alliance in 1882. In due course an answering geopolitical power play raised tension in Europe with the alliance between republican France and autocratic Russia of 1894, designed to threaten Germany and its allies with a war on two fronts, fostering French hopes of revenge for the humiliation of 1870 and Russian designs in the Balkans and for warm water access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. A prime expression of growing German ambition notwithstanding was the Anglo-German naval arms race of 1898- 1912. A measure of growing German confidence and dangerously vague global aspirations, it was also an example of the tendency of European empires such as the Great Britain and its dependencies to see their vested interests in existential terms, as if their very being was threatened, as indeed it was in imperial terms. This, together with the universal tendency to favour aggressive strategies hankering after the quick decisive wars of the past, won by small professional armies rather than aroused nations at arms, in an era where emerging military technology favoured the defensive, brought on the Great War and its serial military disasters. Strategy was framed by general staffs throughout Europe along lines of professional military tunnel vision in defiance of the political, strategic and tactical teaching of Clausewitz, who had learnt from the Napoleonic Wars what the generals who were forever winning them in disregard of modern experience in the United States and South Africa had not. Thus military planning and diplomatic brinkmanship were to thrust Europe into a belligerent abyss. This was the continental framework in which colonial clashes reverberated one after another in the years prior to 1914, in a cultural context where some welcomed the prospect of war as a modernising socioeconomic factor.60

The `belle epoque’ was a high point of European imperialism. Hence it is hardly surprising that the incipient clashes between the great European powers frequently manifested themselves as functions of colonial entanglements and the collision of spheres of influence in the continental periphery. No sooner had the Anglo-German naval arms race broken out than brinkmanship erupted between France and Great Britain at Fashoda on the Upper Nile in 1898, where a French force faced off against the British conquerors of the

Mahdi in Sudan. This confrontation brought to a head the contradiction between French plans for a Central African railway from West Africa to the Red Sea and Rhodes’ scheme for a Cape to Cairo railway. Aware that she would have to relinquish her claim to the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as the price of German support if she were to challenge Britain in Africa, France was forced to back down.61 This was an early example of how colonial concerns could reverberate on the European balance of power. But by April 1904 Great Britain and France were reconciled by a common fear of a rising German Empire, and signed a series of agreements ending a millennium of conflict and reconciling colonial frictions, celebrated in Paris as the `Entente Cordiale’. In 1905 French and German spheres of influence clashed in Morocco, one of the few remaining independent African states, during the Tangier Crisis. Although the Concert of Europe successfully isolated Germany at the Algeciras Conference in 1906, this only occurred after France mobilised its armed forces for a European conflict to protect its suzerainty, reinforcing the Entente and raising tensions with the Triple Alliance. In 1907 Great Britain resolved its differences in the Central Asian `Great Game’ with France’s ally Russia, completing the German sense of encirclement. In this international context and emboldened by the Young Turk revolution, which had destabilised Istanbul, the Balkan nations rose for their independence in 1908. This occasioned a biennium of bitter modern warfare at Turkey’s expense in Europe’s South East, which further destabilised the multi-cultural, cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Dual Monarchy by nationalist example. Soon North Africa was also in ferment. In early 1911 a rebellion broke out in Morocco against France’s client the Sultan, who was soon besieged in his palace. France sent in a flying column in April to protect its mining and other interests, ostensibly to protect French lives and property. Spain fell upon the stricken state like a vulture in June. Germany responded by sending the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan Atlantic port of Agadir to assert its trade interests, provoking a full blown international crisis and discouraging Britain’s attempts to restrain France, provoking the dispatch of Royal Navy battleships to Moroccan waters on a war footing to preserve the Entente and the strategic pre-eminence of Gibraltar. On 21 July, the progressive Liberal `Welsh wizard’ David Lloyd George, who had been a critic of British imperialism during the Boer Wars, warned Germany that Great Britain would defend her interests.62 This in conjunction with a French induced run on the Mark and German banks forced the Kaiser’s government to back down, polarising however German public opinion between those who thought `the Panther lunge’ a leap in the dark and opponents who clamoured for escalating naval rearmament of the High Seas fleet. No sooner had Europe escaped this near miss than the Liberal Kingdom of Italy invaded Libya, seizing

the urbanised coastal centres and further destabilising Turkey. The war which raged into the following year reached as far afield as the Dodecanese islands off the coast of Asia Minor as Italy fought to revive memories of its Roman and Venetian possessions, not to say marry Liberal and Catholic political traditions at home in a new anti-Socialist nationalism. In the Second Balkan War of 1912-13, Turkey recovered her position in Europe somewhat, at the expense of the Balkan states which had fallen out over the spoils of the First Balkan War. (Incidentally a war correspondent who gained valuable military experience observing the Second Balkan War was the future leader of the Soviet Red Army, Leon Trotsky.63)64

The continent was not only internationally increasingly unstable. Its nation states and cosmopolitan empires were also internally riven. Belle Epoque Europe was `civilised’, industrialising and urbanising at an unprecedented rate. But as Keynes was to comment, the veneer was to prove skin deep, the confidence complacent. It was a time of schemes of arbitration between nations and even international governance, but then as we have seen, it had to be. It was a collection of hierarchical class societies, of monarchies and parliaments sometimes sovereign and sometimes only consultative, with the aristocracy still ensconced in the professionalising military, society and the state. As one recent historian has commented, this worst and best of times was not unlike our own, globalising and with expectations of peace persisting long term, but wracked towards its end by international crises described above.65 These were the years of the birth of mass literacy and the nationalist mass media, which just goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Cities were insalubrious, working hours were long and conditions hard. In Liberal parliamentary Britain and Italy for example, troops were regularly called out to quell industrial or rural unrest. In Italy there were nationwide agrarian and bread riots and a monarchical military coup in the commercial capital of Milan in1898. There was an anarcho-socialist uprising provoked by colonial warfare in Barcelona in 1909. These were years of cultural irrationalism, when Freud analysed the sewers of the soul and the French engineer turned `syndicalist’ and later fascist sympathiser George Sorel irresponsibly theorised worker rebellion in uproar motivated by myth in his Reflections on Violence.

The Advertiser’s coverage over the better part of half century of these developments remains to be researched. What is clear is that the full enormity of the European and global situation did not at first dawn on Bonython with the Bosnian assassination. While The

Advertiser reported received opinion that the Archduke’s death might even fell a reputedly tottering and divided Empire, its perceived political ramifications were limited to those for the Habsburg dynasty.66 Indeed the news from Sarajevo burst in a context of conventional peacetime and provincial news values. Whereas The Times of London carried no less than seven news items of the assassination on 29 June,67 Advertiser coverage in the ensuing days was light. In the preceding days The Advertiser understandably reported the coming-on before the High Court of `the case for the men’ in `The Tramway Trouble’.68 Almost as prominent was the news that Australia’s pre-eminent batsman, Victor Trumper, anxious not to have his words misconstrued by the press (a problem even then), had laconically written to the Board of Cricket Control that he was `unavailable’ to tour South Africa and would say no more to reporters. CG Macartney was unlikely to endanger his new railway job by an extended absence, and at least four of Australia’s best could not go, including the great South Australian left hander Clem Hill, and a talented outfielder; a number of these semi- professional players had business interests to attend to.69 Not that metropolitan news from the centre of the empire was overlooked. Another hot contemporary issue was suffragette protest `at home’, reported without the slightest editorial hint that women there were denied rights long granted in South Australia and the antipodean Commonwealth. As The Advertiser’s Special Correspondent reported from London:

Suffragette lunacy has surely reached its climax during the past ten days. The wild women have indulged in a perfect orgy of senseless outrage. Passing over their ridiculous and utterly ineffective attempt to `storm’ Buckingham Palace in order to present a petition to the King, they have, amongst other offences, been guilty of – Causing disorder and insulting the King at the charity matinee of `The Silver King’ at His Majesty’s Theatre; Damaging five pictures, one registered to be worth £50,000, at the National Gallery and one picture at the Royal Academy; Causing degrading scenes of violence at Bow Street and other police courts; Attempting to burn Stoughton Hall…on the outskirts of Leicester, and to blow up the Rosehall United Free Church, Edinburgh.70

There were other tokens too in these exasperated days of The Strange Death of Liberal England, as Oxford educated George Dangerfield characterised the pre-war period as early as

1935.71 Along with the agitation for votes for women there was labour unrest throughout Britain and paramilitary organisation on both sides of the sectarian divide in Ireland. This was echoed industrially as we have seen and politically in South Australia. In the country at Booleroo Centre on 25 June the Reverend Father McEvoy lectured on `Home Rule For Ireland’ for the benefit of the local hospital board.72

As June wore into July notice in the columns of The Advertiser of the emerging diplomatic crisis in Europe was sparse though not undiscernible. On 2 July the newspaper carried notices of the arrest of hundreds at Sarajevo in connection with the assassination, anti- Serbian demonstrations in Vienna and the even handed response of Belgrade deploring both the killing and accusations of the German press `seeking to inculpate Servia in the crime.’ Yet the coverage the following day was still more concerned with the sensational plot itself than its continental reverberations, although on the 7th the opinion of a Budapest journal that the assassination `was undoubtedly promoted at Belgrade’ was reported as `Plain Speaking’. Australian reaction to the assassination was subdued. The Governor General’s cablegram of condolence to the Austrian Emporer had been duly noted on the 3rd. But when the Opposition Leader’s Bundaberg policy speech for the Commonwealth election campaign underway was reported on the 7th, although the Honourable Andrew Fisher made mention of naval and military defence he made no reference to the situation in Europe. On 9 July however The Advertiser carried a significant brief notice from Vienna of a `prolonged sitting of the Ministerial Council’ under the headlines ÀUSTRIA AND SERVIA/A MENACING OUTLOOK/TROOPS CONCENTRATING ON SERVIAN FRONTIER. Still there was no intimation of the risk of a continental rather than a local war, much less that the British Empire and its Australian Dominion might be involved. On the 11th `The SARAJEVO CRIME’ was again canvassed as a matter between ÀUSTRIA AND SERVIA’, over a report from Berlin that the Cologne Local Anzeiger ìn an inspired article’ had offered the opinion that Austria would receive the moral support of Germany ìf the responsibility of the Sarajevo crime were brought home to the subjects [!] of Servia’. In this way The Advertiser implicitly signalled a semi-official echo of the fateful `blank cheque’ Berlin had offered Vienna in preceding days.73 The same day there was local news of a requiem mass held at Saint Ignatius Church, Norwood for the slain Arch Duke, remembered as a devout patron of the Catholic faith. Still, the crisis which most engaged the newspaper was that in Ulster74, also one not without local resonance. The international dimension of things did not altogether

escape notice, but it was expressed in rather generic if ominously racial terms. The readiness of the High Seas’ Fleet’s Third Squadron was mentioned in the same issue under the banner headline `THE GERMAN MENACE’, a headline re-employed some days later to denounce German injustice and bellicosity by a Captain Bertrand Stewart.75 But effectively The Advertiser in the interim ran quiet on European developments for almost a fortnight, only signalling on the 14th diplomatic tensions between GERMANY AND RUSSIA regarding an incident of espionage concerning the plans of the Konigsberg fortress in Prussia.

This curious press silence came to an abrupt end on Saturday 25 July, when The Advertiser warned TROUBLE AHEAD and reported the SHARP NOTE FROM VIENNA to Serbia. Over the weekend the penny dropped. On Monday 27 the paper editorialised about THE WAR CLOUD, but still discussed it in terms of continental rivalries between `Teuton and Slav.’ Nevertheless some appreciation of the enormity of the disaster beginning to unfold began to dawn. The editorial opened

Once again Europe, one might say indeed civilisation, is lying under the shadow of a tremendous calamity. The terrible menace of war is hanging over it, and war on a scale it has never yet known.

Only as an afterthought was the prospect of Great Britain being `drawn in’ to this `Armageddon’ canvassed with respect to the risk such a conflict might present to her position in India. The Adelaide morning daily was more emphatic in its news columns that same day, announcing within a black border that `there has been an alarming development in the European situation’, under the headlines WILL THERE BE WAR?/SERVIA REJECTS THE AUSTRIAN NOTE/ARMIES AND NAVIES MOBILISING/FEARS OF A GENERAL EUROPEAN CONFLICT. Yet the related news from London was still all about Ulster with no mention that the European situation had strategic implications on the continent for Great Britain herself.

When The Advertiser published on the 28th a map of `the probable theatre of war’, it was still a localised conflict in the Balkans that was on its mind, as Germany strove diplomatically to give the Dual Monarchy a free hand there. But Russia it was reported the same day was never going to stand aside and leave isolated its Slav protégé Serbia in such an unequal contest. Nevertheless The Advertiser was lulled into a false moment of optimism, commenting that `so far as the international aspect is concerned the fears of a general European war are not quite so grave’ despite the preparations being made for it, given the German endeavours. Britain’s role, in the hopes of the British Ambassador to Berlin, was mediation. But the truth peeped through the commentary in the form of a report from a Russian newspaper that Russian intervention against Austria would bring Germany in, precipitating `the biggest upheaval since the Napoleonic wars.’ An unsigned item asked WILL IT BE A WORLD WAR?, admitting that `the situation contains all the ingredients of a world conflagration.’ Clearly the paper’s editorial line on 28 July was equivocal. A default position was struck in an article entitled HISTORY RECALLED reprinted from 1903, which emphasised `German ambitions and plans for world-rule’ whose reach would extend from the Balkans to Persia. If war did eventuate, the German challenge to Great Britain would be seen in Adelaide as the root cause. Likewise in Paris on the 28th, according to a report published in The Advertiser the following day, the optimism felt the day before was not credited officially and Germany was considered to be arbiter of the situation.

Also on the 29th the issue of GREAT BRITAINS OBLIGATIONS was first taken closely under examination in the editorial columns. The empire’s position was characterised as that a misunderstood glorious isolation. Britain was free of treaty obligations tying its hands on the continent and would not intervene in a localised Balkan conflict. But British Foreign Secretary Lord Edward Grey implicitly distinguished between British obligations and British interest in the maintenance of the continental balance of power. If another power, for example, Russia became involved, `the situation would become different, for it would then be a question of the peace of Europe’. The editorialist opined that Britain could not afford to tolerate a continental hegemon. There was no discussion of Australian as distinct from British interests in this survey of great power politics as it was being played out half a world away.

The editorial on the 30th again focussed on Berlin rather than Vienna, arguing that

if Germany wants war…her primary aim is to bring under one government all the German-speaking peoples of the Continent; and her secondary aim, to dominate the world, on sea as well as land…Only a gigantic war could contribute to the realisation of such a scheme as this; and a war that would pulverise Russia and France would make Germany…far more powerful than Bonaparte’s Empire.

The fears raised by Pan-German expansionism `from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf’ could only be dispelled by Berlin’s acceptance of British mediation in the crisis. As such Germany was responsible for averting calamity, given the close co-ordination of its views with bellicose Habsburg policy. The news columns reported the situation `particularly grave’ given German rejection of British mediation. The dynamic of alliance which would see Russia aid Serbia if attacked by Austria and France assist Russia, bringing about `the great European war of which many statesmen are said to live in dread’ was also canvassed. An important Australian reaction to the crisis was reported the same day as an Adelaide news item. Labor Opposition leader Andrew Fisher had addressed a successful Exhibition Hall meeting the previous evening during the Federal election campaign, in which he had stated that

Europe seemed at the present to be in a blaze. Labor…would continue [its] policy of independence for Australia but at the same time, cooperating fully and heartily with the mother country in any operation that would enable defence to be more effectively undertaken. The policy was not new – it went back five years – and the Labor Party stood by it.

In other words Labor would rally to imperial defence doctrine. The same issue carried analysis on HOW WAR WOULD AFFECT AUSTRALIA which was curiously focussed to an exclusive degree on economic dislocation from European markets. The article went out of its way to exclude any `immediate danger of getting a whiff of powder in our nostrils.’ We in Australia would unfortunately exercise practically no influence. But combatants were not the

only victims of war. Australia would be a non-combatant casualty of war through treasure forgone rather than bloodshed. No more singular testimony can be imagined that the real cost of war would come home directly to Australia as a combatant Dominion of the Empire to an extent unimaginable, ravaging the country and changing it forever.

Political mobilisation of the establishment was in any case underway, with Governor Sir Henry Galway reported on Saturday 1 August discoursing on THE BONDS OF EMPIRE to the Chamber of Commerce. Calling for individual sacrifice, he ventured that

the truly patriotic Australian does not sacrifice his more local patriotism by becoming a loyal citizen of the Empire…The United Kingdom, in common with the remotest Dominions, shares the perils attendant upon any action of foreign foes, which might endanger, even temporarily, its control of the ocean highways. Great Britain’s friends will be our friends, and her enemies ours also, so long as the Empire endures.

With this declaration of blue water doctrine, His Excellency considered Australian interest in the impending war sufficiently stated. He was echoed on Monday 3 August by the editorialist of The Advertiser

Here in Australia we shall stand by the wise, cautious and far-seeing statesmen of the Motherland…Peace or war, victory or defeat, we are with the mother country. Let us, then, offer whatever help may be acceptable. If Australia is desired, let her go…If the help of our fleet would be acceptable in the centre of naval strategy let us not hesitate to send it.

Curiously in view of after events but in keeping with the logic of a maritime empire, it was naval rather than military assistance that was envisaged. Only the next day however the newspaper reported that along with placement of the Royal Australian Navy under British

command, an expeditionary force was to be offered. This was the kernel of what was to become the Australian Imperial Forces.

It can be seen then the enormity of the war in prospect `termed by The Advertiser in its editorial of 4 August `the most frightful war of our times, a war which must surpass in horror and devastation the worst of historical wars’ was belatedly adequately comprehended by the newspaper, but not its full effects upon Australia. War guilt in the words of The Times of London was sheeted home to Germany for her assumed ambition to European hegemony and because `she could have stayed the plague had she spoken to Vienna as she speaks when in earnest.’Associated with these items was a map of `the theatre of war’, featuring this time continental Europe entire. On a local note professions of loyalty to their adopted country as British subjects by the South Australian German community were carried. The editorial of the following day canvassed GREAT BRITAIN’S INTERVENTION arguing that the United Kingdom would be next if it were to stand by and allow France to be crushed, Great Britain’s strategic guarantee of Belgian neutrality being mentioned. In an associated column entitled CLOSING THE RANKS the British Empire was spoken of as a multi-national communion of liberty, justice and free institutions bound together by the crimson thread of kinship, loyally answering the bugle’s call `as a happy band of brothers.’ The news columns carried two reports of the remarks of Sir Edward Grey emphasis that Britain would act not out of treaty obligations but out of considerations of interest and honour. If the analysis The Advertiser applied to the not particularly critical cables it received from Europe was not jingoistic, neither was it original. It evoked long standing conventional mainstream opinion it had contributed to shaping. It was an institutionally buttressed establishment view. The extent to which this was so can be seen from the authoritative pre-war comments below.

There are millions…who are ready to pluck the sceptre from nerveless hands so soon as the old spirit is allowed to degenerate…England has time…to put her military affairs in order; time to implant and cherish the military ideal in the hearts of her children; time to prepare for a disturbed and anxious twentieth century…From the nursery and its toys to the Sunday school and its cadet company, every influence of affection, loyalty, tradition and education should be brought to bear on the next

generation of British boys and girls, so as deeply to impress upon their young minds a feeling of reverence and admiration for the patriotic spirit of their ancestors.

General Sir Ian Hamilton published these opinions in A Staff Officer’s Scrapbook in London in 1905. His words echoed throughout the British Empire, including the young Dominion of Australia.76 Hamilton was a conventional military thinker whose interpretation of the strategic challenge facing the Empire channelled mainstream opinion. He was to command the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force landed at Gallipoli without distinction. His plan for mass indoctrination of youth in the glories of imperial patriotism was effectively establishment policy in the years leading up to the Great War throughout the Empire, implemented in Australian schools amongst others.77 The rallying to the colours which saw so many eligible Australian men and boys volunteer for the Great War in 1914 can’t be understood apart from this prior ideological preparation. Hamilton’s program was successfully implemented. Nor can the associated consequences which lead to the outpouring of grief and patriotism which accompanied the Gallipoli landing be understood otherwise. By the time the Dardanelles Cenotaph was erected the Anzac attacks at Lone Pine and the Nek in August had occurred, and news of them had filtered through to the Adelaide public via its press. This was when the reality of industrial warfare, so hard to imagine at the outbreak of the conflict, began to set in. Just how it was felt and thought and worked through is the story of the Dardanelles Cenotaph itself.

V SA Nativism & the Australian Wattle Day League

The history of the Dardanelles Cenotaph is the history of the organisation which promoted it from conception to inauguration, namely the South Australian Wattle Day League, a ladies auxiliary established in 1890 by the local ANA to assist in the work of nation building. In particular it is the story of two male officers of the League, the journalist William J Sowden and the master builder Walter Torode. It may seem strange that two men were officers of a ladies auxiliary, but that would be anachronistic, for in those days it was not exceptional for gentlemen to help out `the weaker sex’. Torode designed the cenotaph itself and Sowden stage managed its inauguration as a natural expression of the Nativism of which they were exponents and which accordingly shaped the memorial itself.

William J Sowden, pugnaciously progressive conservative and virulent anti-Socialist, was arguably the most industrious South Australian opinion maker of the early 20th century. A pioneering official of the South Australian ANA and an editor of The Register for thirty years, he promoted a synthesis of nationalism and imperialism and sought to politicise and modernise the Association he had helped to establish.78 Sowden prospered professionally as the ANA grew in a happy synthesis of enlightened, self-interested boosterism. The Wattle Blossom League as it was originally called was the brainchild of his campaigning drive, and he never tired of personally claiming credit for having conceived it, neither in the course of promoting the League within the Association79 and boosting the latter’s nationalistic credentials, nor when acting as the League’s official historian.80 In this latter capacity Sowden reported having, as Vice-President of the Adelaide No 1 Branch of the ANA, obtained its approval in September 1889 to seek the endorsement of the Association’s South Australian Board for `the formation of a ladies’ society in conjunction with the ANA’.81

Matters advanced in a businesslike fashion by the time the South Australian ANA Conference met on 13 March 1890 and ratified the formation of `a body of ladies working to advertise the objects of the ANA…to be managed independently…by a committee of ladies and gentlemen.’ This `independent’ mixed management scheme assured the parent body control of the new affiliate, whilst guaranteeing `that it should in no way interfere with the

management of the Association or it rules and regulations’.82 The self-satisfaction of Sowden is understandable. His political know how appears in the presentation of constitutional arrangements to the Board which circumvented conservative objections based on longstanding tensions between the Board and the Branch, which was the body of the Association in South Australia.83 Thus Sowden promoted his plan for the relaunching of the ANA in South Australia as a mainstream patriotic organisation.

Nor had the President-elect of the Adelaide Branch wasted the time given over to prelininaries. Within a few days the League had shown the Association what it could do, dazzling the city with a remarkable Wattle Bloom Social. According to a press report `the Town Hall was filled with an audience composed principally of ladies.’ Sowden gave `the set address, explanatory of the purposes of the proposed League’. In an inaugural pamphlet for the League, which formally got under way in May with a membership of sixty-one, Lady Eleanor Symon (the wife of the jurist and Anti-Socialist Senator for South Australia Sir Josiah Symon) as President-designate continued in this vein. She described the wattle as distinctively Australian and having `generally a clear golden hue, like solidified sunshine… To the native-born Australian the Wattle stands for home, country, kindred, sunshine and love – every instinct that the heart most deeply enshrines; Indeed Lady Symon was convinced that the sudden sight of a spray of wattle flooded the hearts of Australians abroad `with that complex, yet primitive emotion we call Patriotism’.84 William Sowden by contrast reminded the Annual Banquet of the Commercial Travellers Association in Adelaide in 1911 that `South Australia had led in bringing Federation down from the clouds’. So far as Wattle Day was concerned, he informed the salesmen `the great idea at the root of the celebrations is the recognition of Australian production’.85 Patriotic ideals evidently had material foundations.

But however varying their emphasis or style, all exponents of the Wattle Day League sought to advance Nativism by promoting recognition of the wattle as a national floral emblem. The membership base of Association and League fell considerably during the economic depression which was such a feature of the social life of the last decade of the 19th century.86 Nonetheless, the moderate Association was to profit from the crisis of radicalism,87 and the League benefited organisationally from a sharper focus, reflected in its amended title, upon promotion of the Saturday nearest the first day of Spring as Wattle Day.88 Indeed the

ethos of Association and League was reinforced in the climate of international crisis which became pervasive in the new century, and led to a redoubling of long practiced patriotic responses. In a crisis the League was able to swing into action.

As war threatened in late July, FJ Mills, the Chair of the League’s Program Committee, wrote to the Town Clerk of the City of Adelaide `to request that your Council will be kind enough to extend the same kindly courtesy as last year by providing facilities for tree planting under the auspices of the League on Wattle Day, August 29th’. It was proposed to plant as few as twenty-six wattles in Cresswell, Brougham and Esat Terrace Gardens, and Elder, Kingston and Osmond Parks. As `Creswell Gardens would be…the most central…the Prime Minister, His Excellency the Governor and Lady Galway, the Premier and Mrs Peake, and his Worship the Mayor and the Mayoress would be invited to plant trees’. Once war was actually declared, all that was necessary was for further arrangements to be made for the Governor to plant an oak among the wattles to symbolise the ties that bound Australia to the Empire. No more than a fortnight’s notice was necessary to arrange this augmentation of the program.89 When a year later the Dardanelles Cenotaph was erected by the League, the site chosen was also in the city Parklands, and the gesture was associated with a scheme for planting wattle in memory of Australians fallen overseas in the ranks of the Australian Imperial Forces, and as such, as the League saw it, in the twin causes of Empire and Nativism. After all the AIF were not denominated the Australian Imperial Forces for nothing. The Gallipoli Memorial Grove, as its ideators at first denominated it, was very much the unforeseen but natural expression of the patriotic sentiments voiced at the League’s inauguration. In time, the original site of the Cenotaph on Sir Lewis Cohen Drive came to be known, more simply and less stridently, as Wattle Grove.90

V. Mr Walter Torode Master Builder91

One of the several South Australian Vice-Presidents of the South Australian Wattle Day League at the outbreak of the Great War was an enterprising master builder by the name of Walter Charles Torode. He was born in 1858 the son of a Guernsey cabinet maker in the Channel Isles who had arrived in South Australia in 1854. A member of the progressive Brougham Place Congregational Church, Walter Torode was a muscular Christian who early displayed an ability to combine piety, business and pleasure. In 1879 he completed his apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. He played cricket for a couple of seasons with North Adelaide, long cherishing his best score of 68 and the games he played on Adelaide Oval. He soon showed canny determination off the playing arena as well.

In 1881 Torode married Sophie Minnie Gellentien and moved into the growing Adelaide Hills community, anticipating the opening of the Hills Railway in 1883 which transformed the villages of Aldgate and Stirling into resorts of the gentry. Torode leased quarries at Heathfield, Stirling West and Burdett on the Murray. He specialised in the building of large houses, constructed under the supervision of prominent Adelaide architects. Employing day labour and refusing to subcontract, Torode developed a flourishing business based on vertical integration, with a reputation for superior work in a range of materials. The connections made through the Stirling West Cricket Club (best scores 103 and 103n.o.) yielded more than mere recreation. He derived great satisfaction as a Superintendent of Sunday schooling for the poor.

In 1904 Torode returned to the city on the plain as the prophet of a concrete technology manifesto entitled How to Build. He moved into the newly fashionable inner southern parkside suburbs to live in a series of picturesque display homes built with the workforce assembled to execute local commissions. The first of these eclectic expressions of an ebullient if derivative mind was completed in Fullarton (1904) followed by another in Unley (1908). That same year he found time to captain a South Australian Cricket Association team which toured Victoria. The following year he built again, at Unley Park. In 1913 his first wife died. The next year war broke out and Torode remarried with Ida Edith

Lower, completing another picturesque house upon an octagonal plan in Wayville, `Amphi Cosma’.The central situation of the Dardanelles Cenotaph and Wattle Grove he projected in 1915, abutting onto Colonel Light’s Morphett Street axis bisecting the heart of the South West Parklands, locates it unmistakably as a public amenity for the prestige inner suburbs Torode was so profitably developing. Once again philanthropy figured as a form of enlightened self-interest. Accordingly he emphasised in writing to the Adelaide Town Clerk respecting the proposal that `in years to come “Wattle Grove” will be an attraction to citizens and visitors and a pleasant resort on summer evenings’.92

But Torode had not, indeed, made his fortune solely as a domestic builder and suburban developer. The Methodist Chapel at Aldgate, additions to the Crafers Church of England and the Stirling Institute all owed something to Torode’s determination to win a share of ecclesiastical and other institutional or public commissions. Public monuments such as that to Edward VII King and Emporer on North Terrace were put into his hands. His association with Sowden, the ANA and the Wattle Day League probably arose from such commissions as that for the statue to MacDougall Stuart in Victoria Square, given that the Association had been campaigning for some time for public recognition of pioneer icons.93 Certainly Torode left a creditable if archaic mark on his city, building the Campbell Building for the Children’s Hospital (1896), the Elder Conservatorium for the University (1897), the Stock Exchange (1900) and the Lady Chapel and western spires of St Peter’s Cathedral (1901). Numerous other commissions of an ecclesiastic, scholastic or public character were fulfilled by Torode in the new century, principally in the southern suburbs or the city, to which only a detailed architectural history could do justice. What is clear is that when war broke out, Torode had long been one of the foremost master builders in the city. It is fitting that today the Master Builder’s Association headquarters stands on South Terrace, across from the Princess Elizabeth Playground and equidistant between the current site of the Dardanelles Cenotaph he designed and Wattle Grove where it originally stood. A thrusting man, he was ready, willing and able to compete for any monumental commissions that might arise. He appreciated the publicity value of success in this conspicuous arena of the building game. A man with a genius for self-promotion, he throve on the business-like symbiosis between egoism and altruism in the commercial life of his community. It is doubtful indeed that Torode could have understood business, philanthropy and public piety as anything other than facets of the active life he had lead since youth. This was the complex frame of mind in

which Torode conceived of the Dardanelles Cenotaph and executed it for the Wattle Day League.

We know pretty well how the idea came to Torode of a cenotaph and grove to commemorate the Anzac dead. He left us an account of it in his brief Recollections…, redolent of the religiosity of the chapel and of the practical man who had understood from the beginning as many more influenced by propaganda had not that the landing at Anzac Cove had failed to meet its objectives:

An inspiration was given me when the sad news came through of the attempted landing of our troops at Gallipoli and the bravery of our men, to create in memory of them an evergreen memorial. An appeal was made to the general public, resulting in all material and labour being given free of cost. Thus Wattle Grove in Sir Lewis Cohen Drive off South Terrace was brought into being…It was my privilege to design the outlay of the garden, Obelisk, Pergola…94

These keynotes of sadness, remembrance and reverence were incorporated by Torode in his design for the Cenotaph. From the first it was conceived as an integral part of a symbolic wattle grove in the best traditions of the League. But however humanly mixed the motivations of Torode, who bore limited out of pocket expenses for the project, their wordliness was very properly and sincerely subordinated to the purposes of public grieving. Indeed the Torode testimonial emphasises that the Dardanelles Cenotaph was a brainchild of sadness, born of the nationwide shock at the casualty lists from Gallipoli emphasised by Scott.95 Energetic self-promoter that he was, there is no more reason to doubt the sincerity of Torode in this enterprise than there was in any other of his pious or public spirited commissions.

Nor did he fail to draw due credit from his achievement when he thereafter had professional or personal need. In 1928 his second wife died as his disappointing post-war career in Adelaide was drawing to a close. The following year he belatedly completed his last

39 major South Australian contract, the Memorial Hall at St Peter’s College, and removed himself to Melbourne. There he entered into an ineffectual partnership with Allex Gairn of Collins Street, on what was doubtless a falling market for building commissions. A characteristic note of pride and boosterism appears in a press notice of his arrival in Melbourne:

In 1915, as Vice-President of the South Australian Wattle League, he suggested a Wattle Grove in honour of those who fell at Gallipoli, and designed it with a stiking enclosure and obelisk under an open pergola. He induced public spirited citizens to donate all the granite and other materials needed, and his own workmen volunteered to supply their labour.

The column hailed Torode as `probably the originator of tree planting in memory of Australian soldiers.’96 As the concept of sacred groves is a classical one which was already ancient among the Greeks in whose culture the Australian ruling class were educated on the British model, the loneliness of this purported distinction was perhaps too much honour for Torode. Nonetheless the concept of a memorial grove was integral to what was recognised at its unveiling as the first Anzac memorial of its kind. Its designer was justifiably proud of being a cultural pioneer, and was recognised for it on Anzac Day 1929.

VI. `A Plan So Patriotic’

By August 1914 the modus operandi of the League, publicly promoting the symbolism of the wattle in the community and high places by means of social and media contacts, were functioning smoothly. The inspiration given to Torode was a natural expression of the working relationship the League had developed with the City Council as a proponent of wattle planting in the Parklands. Indeed it is clear that in the mind of Torode and his colleagues, the proposal was for a sacred grove of wattle with a focal cenotaph rather than vice versa. Given the League’s long established relations with the City Council and State dignitaries, it was simply a matter of activating and expanding an existing program of planting as the willingness of officials to be involved increased with the scale of the international crisis.

So it was that Sowden’s Register announced to the public on 7 August 1915 the submission to `the City Council, as advised by its park lands committee, of `A Fine Wattle Day Scheme’ for `BEAUTIFYING THE PARKS’. The Register notified its readers `that the League intends, with the permission of the City Council, to make a splendid new departure in connection with its Wattle Day celebrations’, emphasising that

it is noteworthy that this national body has with all its tree planting, never…done anything which would have the effect of interfering with the people’s use of the parks. On the contrary, all its efforts have tended to the further beautification of those reserves… If the program should be carried to completion, Wattle Day this year will not only have a distinctive feature, but will be associated with a permanent beautification of the south park lands…in the shape of a magnificent tree-and-wattle grove, commemorative of Australia’s initial participation in a European war.

`The proposed plantation and accessories’, announced The Register

are to perpetuate [the memory of] the Australian soldiers’ landing at the Dardanelles on April 25 1915…The object in view is one of duty – to honour the brave. They gave their all, and the least we can do is keep their memory green by cultivating this grove of wattle near to our city. It is suggested that relatives should plant the trees…and that each tree should be numbered, and an index kept of the names of the departed ones commemorated…The design submitted…by Mr Torode…proposed to fence in an area [of] about 150 feet square…with entrances from about four sides, the fencing to be similar to that of other enclosures on the parklands.

The two paths so provided for divided the plantation into quadrants as by a cross. `In the centre, anticipated The Register will be a small obelisk of red –and-grey granite, with the simple inscription `Dardanelles 25 April 1915’…Around and above this’ continued The Register

will be a rustic pavilion, 25 feet in diameter (supported on posts of reinforced concrete), to have wide openings on four sides. Beyond this an outer circle, with a radius of 33 feet…will provide space for future gatherings. In this area five trees will be planted as emblems of the Allies. The outer area will be a circle of 66 feet radius, making four quadrants, in which will be planted 72 wattle trees of assorted variety, with a wide pathway on the outer circle of wattles. Access will be given to the four corner beds of the square, which will be planted with suitable native trees and shubs. The main entrance to the park will be through a rustic pergola, over which will be the letters `Wattle Grove 1915’.

Truly Torode was `one of the most enthusiastic and practical life members of the Adelaide branch of the Australian Wattle Day League.’ And as The Register proclaimed, of all his associations with Adelaide public monuments, this promised `to be his best and most enduring.’97

Within the week of this description appearing, on August 11 1915, the Honorary Secretary of the League, Jean F Young, followed up this press coverage by writing to

His Worship the Mayor of Adelaide and City Council…to make application…for permission to decorate the Statues and public buildings of the City…with wattle and flags on September 1 in celebration of Wattle Day and…as a welcome to his Excellency the Governor General who will arrive in Adelaide on that day; and in addition to ask for the sole right for selling wattles in the streets of the City on that day for the purpose of supplying another motor ambulance for the front.98 [underscoring in original]

The Town Clerk replied with alacrity in the affirmative the following day.99

The approval of Council’s Finance Committee respecting the League’s `letter of the 12th instant, was conveyed in writing on 20 August. The preceding correspondence essentially served to establish that the League would supply and erect

the necessary fencing, pergolas [sic], stone edging to beds, seats…painting and other work required, to the satisfaction of the City Gardener. The Corporation will supply the wattle trees and the holes prepared for same, and will attend to the maintenance of the grove when completed.100

It was also determined that the Grove would be established to the west of Cohen Avenue, rather than to the east as originally planned `where there are no athletic grounds or trees to be interfered with.’101 Preparation for planting `by the permanent staff without extra cost’ was costed by the City Gardener at £12/-/-, whilst `keeping beds and paths clear of weeds’ on the same basis was estimated to involve labour to the value of a mere £5/-/- per annum, given that `wattles like most Australian Native plants do not like cultivation around their roots.’102

The next act in the public celebration of the Grove was the publication in Sowden’s Register of news of `WATTLE DAY PREPARATIONS’ featuring ` A Pleasant Recognition’ of the volunteer workforce who had realised Torode’s plans. In the previous fortnight

a number of workmen, mostly in the employ of Mr Walter Torode have freely…given their services in the laying out of the Grove and the erection of the obelisk which together will commemorate the first entrance of Australasian soldiers into European conflict. The committee of the Wattle Day League considered that an early opportunity should be taken to show some slight recognition of the zealous practical patriotism displayed by the workers. Accordingly the ladies of the committee, attended by a number of the gentlemen members, proceeded on Saturday afternoon to the Grove, and in a delightfully informal fashion entertained all the men at tea’.103

Imperial patriotism and Native ethnic pride were a feature of the addresses made to a gathering at the new facility, laced with the stoicism fast becoming traditional to the nationalist idiom. As President of the Wattle Day League and proprietor and editor of The Register WJ Sowden

took occasion to express the acknowledgement of that organisation to all the men who had so splendidly demonstrated their self-denying patriotism by co-operating with the League in paying homage to the brave men who had laid down their lives in the defence of the Empire, and in the struggle of right against tyranny and oppression. His Excellency the Governor-General would doubtless on Tuesday feel the greater pleasure in unveiling the obelisk which formed the essential feature of the scheme designed…by Mr Torode…when he learned that…the whole of the labour necessary to the completion of the project had been given voluntarily and cheerfully by Australian Britons, each of whom was anxious `to do his little bit’ to bring to a successful culmination a plan so patriotic.104

Mr Torode in responding said `that he had been deeply touched by the ready manner in which so many of the workmen who had been with him for many years had responded to the suggestion that they should assist the League in the patriotic work which marked this year’s observance of Wattle Day’. It is noteworthy that Torode’s `volunteers’ were principally men at his dependence whom he recruited by applying the hard word as to what they `should’ do for the war effort, namely supply work unpaid. Nonetheless it is likely that many of them endorsed the patriotism of the project in a general way. They may have felt that some

44 contribution in labour was no unfair corollary of their employer’s commitment in time, money and materials. It is clear that some of these `volunteers’ were indeed long term employees of Torode, who hailed from his old scene of operations in the Hills; `several of the men …lived at Mount Lofty’. They would have had a long commute to participate in this project or boarded in the city and environs. Torode was lyrical and proud of the helpfulness and `genuine self-sacrifice’ of `his men’

and was sure that the community generally would appreciate their assistance in providing a memorial which they trusted and believed would remain to tell its significant story many years after they would all have passed away’.105

The Dardanelles Cenotaph indeed performs its function to this day a century later. But Wattle Grove and its fixtures proved ephemeral, perhaps because despite its national significance, it was conceived on a provincial scale. Nevertheless it is important to remember that the Cenotaph was the brainchild of the ANA Wattle Day League, sanctioned as such by the Adelaide City Council as custodian of the Parklands. To their creator’s, Cenotaph and Grove were twin facilities.

Like a true Master Builder, Torode built for eternity. And he spoke for `his’ men like a capitalist. Probably he spoke for them well enough. Certainly this may be the case if The Register is to be believed, and one of Torode’s foremen, a Mr J Meinchke, commanded any real respect amongst his subordinates. For `at the call of his comrades’ he also made reply:

He said that, although he bore a German name, and was proud of his father, as he ventured to say were all others who knew him at Kapunda were, he was likewise patriotically proud of his British citizenship, and delighted to do his best in a humble way to honour the valour of their brave sons and brothers who had sacrificed their lives for them at the Dardanelles. Every worker engaged in this voluntary service had put his whole soul into the work, and been more than pleased, as a duty and a

privilege, to co-operate with the Wattle Day League in its splendid patriotic enterprise.

Foreman Meinchke’s concept of `British citizenship’ as civic belonging above and beyond ethnicity prefigured the multicultural shape of things to come in the wake of future wars and waves of immigration. But his reported references to `their brave sons and brothers [emphasis added]’106 bespeaks the insecurity of a guest, even in a city which had recently rejected discrimination against German Australians as `contrary to the spirit of British fair play,’107

VIII. It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country

Came the great day in the South Parklands when the monument was inaugurated in the presence of the Governor General, and Sowden, acting as master of ceremonies, congratulated the assembled dignitaries that no gathering more representative could have been convened to honour the League and `their gallant heroes, who had fallen on the heights of Gallipoli’.108 Unlike Shakespeare’s Marc Antony however, he came not to bury the Anzacs but to praise them and the war in which they fought.

The main motive of the memorial to be formally disclosed that day was not grief, but pride, nation pride. It commemorated less the dear Australasian boys who had fallen in the Dardanelles than the entry of Australasian soldiers into European in the name of liberty and honour in which Australia now found herself (Applause)’.109

Thus it was the Tory exponent Sowden who went out of his way to exploit the occasion of public mourning to expound the racial overtones of the war party case, evoking the conservative relief that colonial troops had fought well in a major European engagement. There can be no doubt that Sowden would have found the idea of grieving the war dead without rationalising the war effort both sacrilegious and subversive. Before `the peace to end all peace’ as Wavell termed it broke out at Versaille, Sowden had been rewarded with a knighthood, effectively for services to British imperialism.

As to the specific origins of the concept now realised before the assembled dignitaries,110 Sowden related to them how the process had gotten underway in South Australia `unknown to the League, but through its agency’ tracing a circuitous route from the Governor’s planting of the Great War oak in Cresswell Gardens on Wattle Day of the previous year. Inspired by that occasion

A patriotic citizen, Mr AE Nott, sent some wattle seeds to his son, who was serving at Gallipoli, and that seed was planted upon the graves of their boys. Since then similar attention had been paid to the burial places of soldiers in France and elsewhere by the Overseas Club and the London Branch of the Wattle Day League…They had adopted and adapted the the old-country idea in the Wattle Grove.

To Councillors Angas, Johnson and Clucas was awarded `the special thanks of the League…for the happy thought which led them so to arrange the varities of wattle in the Grove that one tree or another aptly symbolical of Australian hope and aspiration would always be in bloom throughout the year. (Loud applause)111

These origins and the felicitous realisation of the project were enough for a man of Walter Torode’s Christian background to say that he `looked upon what they viewed that day as a divine inspiration to do something for love of country (Applause) Having been called to the podium to elucidate the conception of the ensemble of the cenotaph and grove, Mr Torode read into proceedings the design he had submitted to the Town Clerk, whom he praised, and passed in accounts of the contribution made in labour and in kind by all who had assisted in the project. He said too most significantly that

he had intended to mount three rifles at the apex of the monument, but had been advised not to do so, because in time to come, when the war was over, the impression given by the obelisk should be one of peace and not conflict. He had acted upon that advice. (Applause)112

Clearly Torode’s religious inspiration gave rise to more pacific sentiments than those of Sowden, and had an important influence on the peaceable appearance of a monument eschewing militarism. As such it met with contemporary approval, even amidst such a hand- picked patriotic gathering, so loyal to King and Country. Even Torode’s religiosity was subdued, as appears from his remarks, for he noted

they had not deemed it necessary to mark the obelisk with a cross, because the brilliant southern constellation, celestial emblem of sacrifice, forever cast its inspiring light upon Australia.113

That the cross which surmounts the obelisk today was a later addition, countermanding Torode’s original genial forbearance, dates it as a later addition, possibly early on in the interwar years.

Other aspects of the obelisk were also well meditated. `Portions of the stonework had been polished, while others remained in their rough state, and that had been purposedly designed to commemorate the rough landing which their heroes had experienced at Gallipoli., Nor did Torode hesitate to point the moral of so much care and attention to detail. `It would be hard to imagine a more attractive sight’ he said, speaking of the creeping roses to be trained over the pergola sheltering the cenotaph. `When they looked upon it in the future he hoped they would think of those boys who had once…gazed upon the same scenes, but would return no more. They had done their duty, and he hoped those who remained behind would do theirs.’114 This call to emulation was one indeed which the Governor took up, and which spanned the generations. For as League President Sowden had emphasised `they hoped that many Australian children, in successive generations, would visit the memorial and pay reverent homage to the brave boys whom it commemorated, and honour the national flower’.115

History was to favour the note of pathos in Torode’s remarks as much as the strident patriotism of Sowden. Certainly this was the accent which time was to place on the witness borne by the Dardanelles Cenotaph itself. The history of the conception of the monument and its subsequent consignment to the function of a discrete memorial in a public garden is one of the evolution of public sentiment away from an initial nativist patriotism towards more humanistic concepts of empathy with the combatants and their communities. The revival of Wattle Day observance in recent years has featured participation by representatives of the

Turkish community, for example, and the reading of Ataturk’s compassionate post-war message to mothers of the Anzac fallen. In so far as the terms of this equation are relative, they underline Professor Jay Winter’s finding that public recognition of the human cost of battle was from the very first the principal, enduring bequest to subsequent generations.116 Not even in 1915 could Sowden take the martial call to arms outside the ritual confines of community commemoration and mourning. Revisiting the history of the projection and inauguration of the Dardanelles Cenotaph, above and beyond the seminal sketch given by Inglis, sheds additional light on the society of that day and this. And this is the function of historical enquiry itself, to shed light on the relation between past and present and the conditional options we have as a society for the insidious challenges of the future. For as Dickens wrote `it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…in short, the period was…like the present period…’

In conclusion, it needs to be noted that the erection of the Dardanelles Cenotaph, whilst State endorsed, was not State sponsored. While the South Australian Wattle Day League was very much an establishment association, it was an expression of civil society, not the public sector. Governor General Munro Ferguson, the most pro-consular of imperial appointees to Australian vice-regal dignity in the history of our constitutional monarchy, was guest of honour at its inauguration. The Governor General was essentially the Empire’s chief recruiting officer in the antipodes, patron of Billy Hughes and the national war effort.117 But he was a guest, not a host on Wattle Day 1915. That role fell to WDL President and local press baron Sowden an establishment figure, but not a public official. The Dardanelles Cenotaph is a public monument with private origins in a society which wrestled with the human cost of war then, and continues to wrestle with it now. To the extent that our cult of commemoration is complex and not about the glorification of war, it retains its historical pertinence today, and will into the future. Indeed it should be emphasised that as a monument to commemoration rather than militaristic celebration, and a reminder that this was the balance struck at the inception of that tradition, now a century old, the Dardanelles Cenotaph retains national historical significance. May the Anzac tradition be safeguarded from degenerating through commercialisation and political exploitation from the standard set at its outset.

The risk however is perennial and was there from the start. The seminal Great War poet Wilfred Owen bitterly mocked as `the old lie’ the Latin motto `Dulce e decorum est pro patria mori’ (It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country) taught him in his youth. Owen was a child of the British Empire, which had kept alive in its schools the official civic ethos of Rome as a model of unquestioning patriotism. Owen and many of his generation lived to rue this. Yet the prestige of the victor of Jutland, Admiral Jellico, was being used to promote just this superseded falsehood in Adelaide very soon after the war, as can be seen on an honour board which hangs to this day in the Torrens Building on Victoria Square. Lest we forget indeed.

1 `Anger at Woolies’ Anzac ad’ The Advertiser 16 April 2015 2 Cited by Tom O’Lincoln in the tellingly entitled `The battle over Anzac Day’ in Red Flag 20 April 2015 3 See the transparent remarks of News Corp group editorial director Campbell Reid in `Breathing new life into our Anzac tales’ Sunday Mail 29 March 2015, qualified with some appreciation of the human cost of war by Grantlee Kieza `I was brave in the ring, but I’ve got nothing on these blokes’ ibid. 4 There do seem to have been some Wattle Day celebrations at the cenotaph post-war. See Robert Thornton Wattle Plantings in Adelaide 1914-27 Adelaide City Council Archives. The State Library holds an image of an Anzac Day ceremony attended by the Soldiers’ Mothers Association and presided over by Mr Makin MHR SRG 168/1/58/46 5 Jennie Norberry (Australian War Memorial)-DF 27 August 2012 & E Scott Australia during the War University of Queensland Press St Lucia 1936/89 p289 6 A King Memorials of the Great War in Britain Berg Oxford 1998 7 J Norberry-DF 27 August 2012 citing without page reference J Winter Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning Cambridge University Press NY 1995 8 K Inglis Sacred Places Miegunyah Press Melbourne 1998 p79 9 Physical and historical particulars are cited with photographs and diagrams by Des Ryan in `The forgotten, original Anzac memorial’ in The City Messenger Adelaide 22 April 1998 p6. The same author, at the time Editor in Chief of the metropolitan Messenger Press group, gave cover story treatment to the material in The Eastern Courier of the same date. See also the RSL pamphlet ANZAC MEMORIAL Adelaide South Australia, available from the League. 10 `WATTLE DAY/The Governor-General’ The Register Adelaide 8 September 1915 p11 11 K. Inglis-D.Faber 3 August 1998 and Sacred Places p78-9 citing the Lord Mayor regarding `the first monument to the fallen heroes’. 12 The Advertiser Adelaide 1 June 1935 p8, cited in the RSL leaflet ANZAC MEMORIAL Adelaide South Australia 13 The relationship between the ANA and the Wattle Blossom League in South Australia and subsequently the Wattle Day League is laid out by William J Sowden in his Outline History of the Wattle Blossom Celebration in Australia, Australian Wattle Day League Adelaide 1913 Mortlock Library of South Australiana. Based on this primary source, notice of the Wattle Day League as an ANA affiliate is given by R White in Inventing Australia George Allen & Unwin Sydney 1981 14 JE Menadue A Centenary History of the Australian Natives’ Association 1871-1971 Horticultural Press Melbourne 1971. Menadue may be seen photographed representing Victoria at p212 with his Federal Council colleagues in Melbourne at its meeting of September/October 1965. As an official of the the Association steeped in its ethos and with full access to its records, including contemporary press cuttings, his retrospective, too little referred to by historians, drawing upon the language and concepts of his sources, furnish valuable insight. 15 Ibid p9 16 Ibid p10

17 The ethos and history of mutual aid in 19th century Australia are celebrated in neo-liberal key by Green & Cromwell in Mutual Aid or Welfare State George Allen & Unwin Sydney 1984. The ANA and its culture of self- help and self-improvement are mentioned on p9 & 26 18 Menadue op cit p3 19 See the national profile of the ANA leadership in Green & Cromwell op cit p9. For confirmation regarding the vocations and biographies of leading ANA exponents in South Australia see Appendix II in J Hollinsworth 1965 Adelaide BA Hons Thesis The Australian Natives’ Association in South Australia: A study of Nativist Nationalism 1887-1902 20 See Quaderni del Carcere 12 Einaudi Torino 1977, translated by Quintin Hoare for International Publishers New York as Selections from the Prison Notebooks 1971 21 Menadue op cit p5 22 Hollinsworth op cit p43 23 See the sketch of Wentworth in Vance Palmer’s National Portraits Melbourne University Press 1940/60 24 This evaluation is based on Hollinsworth op cit Chapters II & III, p40, 43, & 60-61. See likewise Appendix II mentioned above. 25 C Bridge `Sir William Sowden (1858-1943) Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol.XII p25 26 `Don’t Hurry the Millenium’ An Australian Native’s Standpoint: Addresses by WJ Sowden MacMillan London 1912 27 On the late Victorian situation of metropolitan imperialism see AP Thornton The Imperial Idea & its Enemies MacMillan London 1966 & R Shannon The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915 Paladin St Albans 1976. For the situation of Australian nationalism in the imperial periphery see L Trainor British Imperialism & Australian Nationalism Cambridge University Press Cambridge & Melbourne 1994 28 Bessant & Spaull Politics of Schooling Pitman Publishing Carlton 1976 p3. See also Bob Bessant `British Imperial Propaganda in Australian Schools 1900-30’ working Papers in Australian Studies 98. An anonymous lady schooled in this era once told me that pupils got the British Empire morning, noon and night. 29 See Chapters 1-2 of Patsy Adam Smith The Anzacs Penguin 2001 30 Rosalie Triolo Our Schools & the War Australian Scholarly Publishing Melbourne 2012 p49 31 Menadue op cit p3 32 Ibid p4 33 See Hollinsworth op cit p24-5 & 65f, drawing upon South Australia’s First War: Some Aspects of the Colony’s Participation in the Boer War 1899-1902 BA Hons Thesis Adelaide 1962 34 Hollinsworth op cit p63 35 Menadue op cit p13, 123 & 128 36 Ibid p264 37 R Gildea Barricades & Borders: Europe 1800-1914 Oxford University Press 1991 p249 38 Expression of the French philosopher Cousin; see per index TS Hamerow Social Foundations of German Unification 1858-71 Princeton University Press 1969 39 Menadue op cit p258 40 Ibid p264 41 Ibid p219 42 Ibid p221-2 43 Hollinsworth op cit p70 characterises the SA Natives as `isolationist’ and `defensive’. 44 Menadue op cit p221-2 Resolution (e) 2nd Federal Conference Melbourne 9 February 1910 45 Ibid p219 46 Hollinsworth op cit Appendix 47 Ibid p65 48 See `AUSTRALIAN PIONEERS/British blood’ Foundation Day Address 26 January 1910 in WJ Sowden An Australian Native’s Standpoint cit 49 C Bridge `Sir William Sowden’ ADB Vol.XII p25 50 Hollinsworth op cit p24 51 Menadue op cit 259 52 Menadue op cit p267. The first VC was won by Albert Jacka of the Wedderburn Branch. Those who emulated him on Gallipoli were W Dunstan of Ballarat East; WJ Symons of Brunswick; and AS Burton of Eurora 53 Menadue op cit 266-7 54 See `Bonython Family’ in Prest et al The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History Wakefield Press Adelaide 2001 p78

55 The Advertiser 29 June; 3 & 7 July 1914 56 See for example the letter from L Rudkin, the Honorary Secretary of the Australian Peace Alliance SA Branch, carried as a news item by The Advertiser on Wattle Day 7 September 1915, the very day Governor General Munro Ferguson was inaugurating the Dardanelles Cenotaph 57 The Advertiser 30 June 1914. For a summary roll call of illustrious European personages assassinated 1898- 1914 see Joll Europe Since 1870 cit p181 58 Certainly a century later the historian Otte amongst others thinks it was so and shocking to `civilised’ contemporaries. See his The July Crisis CUP 2014 p39. The point should be made that the degree of civilisation of opulent bourgeois belle epoque Europe can be exaggerated, given the penurious condition of the working classes, the consequent industrial agitation, and the routine deployment of troops to suppress it in liberal, restricted franchise `democracies’ like Great Britain and Italy 59 Liddell Hart History of the First World War Pan London 1970 p1 60 This paragraph is a synthesis formed from reading Liddell Hart op cit, Joll Europe Since 1870 3rd Edition Penguin London 1983; and Howard `Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914’ and Snyder `Civil-Military Relations & the Cult of the Offensive 1914 & 1984’, both in Miller, Lynne-Jones & Van Evera Military Strategy & the Origins of the First World War Princeton NJ Revised & Expanded Edition 1991 61 Joll Europe Since 1870 3rd Edition cit p86-7 62 Liddell Hart History of the First World War cit p15 63 See Weissman & Williams eds The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912-13 Monad Press NY/Pathfinder Press Australia 1980 64 This paragraph is a synthesis formed from reading Liddell Hart op cit, Joll Europe Since 1870 3rd Edition Penguin London 1983; and Howard `Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914’ and Snyder `Civil-Military Relations & the Cult of the Offensive 1914 & 1984’, both in Miller, Lynne-Jones & Van Evera Military Strategy & the Origins of the First World War Princeton NJ Revised & Expanded Edition 1991 65 Fromkin Europe’s Last Summer op cit p4 & 11 66 `The Austro-Hungarian Horror’ The Advertiser 30 June 1914 67 Otte The July Crisis cit p39 68 The Advertiser 20 June 1914 69 Ibid 70 `The Suffragettes’ The Advertiser 29 June 1914. The edition of 6 July referred to them again, reporting the sentencing to three months imprisonment of one Maude Edwards for damaging a portrait of the King at Edinburgh, the burning of Ballymenoch House in Holywood, Belfast, the complaint of the Women’s Freedom League at the lack of women in the Birthday and New Year’s honours and the arrest at Buckingham Palace of a well-dressed woman carrying two loaded revolvers who had demanded to see the King. 71 Paladin edition London 1970 72 The Advertiser 29 June 1914 73 For discussion of the chronology and mechanics of the issue of `the blank cheque’, see Otte July Crisis Chapter 2 and following pages as per index. 74 See The Advertiser `ULSTER AND HOME RULE…’ 11 July 1914 75 Ibid 20 July `A WARNING NOTE 76 See commentary and citation in Michael Howard `Men Against Fire’ in Miller, Lynne Jones & Van Evera eds Military Strategy & the Origins of the First World War Princeton NJ Revised & Expanded Edition 1991 p14-17 77 See Bessant & Spaull Politics of Schooling Pitman Carlton 1976 p1-6 & Bessant `British Imperial Propaganda in Australian Schools 1900-30’ Working Papers in Australian Studies 98 Sir Robert Menzies Centre For Australian Studies, Institute For Commonwealth Studies, University of London. See also the evocative second chapter of Patsy Adam-Smith The Anzacs, Penguin Melbourne 2014`Moulding the lads’. 78 C Bridge `Sir William Sowden’ ADB Vol.XII p25. See also Hollinsworth op cit p16f 79 Hollinsworth op cit p14 80 Sowden An Australian Native’s Standpoint…p18 81 Sowden Outline History…p2 Note that the 1897 Castlemaine Victorian Conference demanded female membership of the ANA. Sowden’s League may have been a half-measure 82 Hollinsworth op cit p14 citing Board Minutes 13 March 1890 83 The tension between Sowden Vice-President of the ANA Adelaide Branch and the Jewish Lord Mayor Lewis Cohen, Chair of the SA ANA Board, is mention passim in Hollinsworth op cit p15-20, a tension evident in the Board’s guarded acceptance of the establishment of the Wattle Blossom League 84 Lady Eleanor Symon & Muriel Farr Wattle Day League undated, Mortlock Library of South Australiana

85 Sowden An Australian Native’s Standpoint…p118 86 The Wattle Blossom League was so enfeebled it was actually disbanded in June 1893, It was revived in 1910 in Sydney and Adelaide as the Wattle Day League. See Hollinsworth op cit p14-15 & Sowden Outline History p5-9 87 Hollinsworth op cit p61 88 Sowden Outline History…p6-8 89 AWDLSA-Town Clerk Adelaide 22 July & 15 August 1914 Adelaide City Council Archives 90 For the transition in nomenclature see AWDLSA-Town Clerk Adelaide 24 August 1922 & Gregory’s Adelaide Street Directory 37th edition 1988 91 The following account is my reinterpretation of the Introduction to the Heritage Report on Torode and his work by Peter Bell dated 26 September 1988 and held with the Torode Papers Mortlock Library of South Australiana PRG 312 92 W Torode-Town Clerk Adelaide 11 August 1915 Adelaide City Council Archives TCO 2598/1915 Wattle Day League Arrangements 93 Hollinsworth op cit p61-2 & Sowden’s 1910 address `Australian Pioneers’ in An Australian Native’s Standpoint… on latterday settler boosterism 94 WC Torode Recollections of Incidents combined with the career of Walter Charles Torode from boyhood until he became a Master Builder un-paginated 1931 typescript Mortlock Library of South Australiana D3232 (L) 95 See his Australia during the War University of Queensland Press St Lucia 1989 p289 96 `Table Talk’, publication not cited, Melbourne 25 April 1929, Torode Papers Mortlock Library of South Australiana PRG 312 97 The Register 7 August 1915 98 Hon Sec AWDLSA-Town Clerk Adelaide 11 August 1915 TCO 2598/15 Adelaide City Council Archives 99 Town Clerk Adelaide-Hon Sec AWDLSA 12 August 1915 TCO 2598/15 Arrangements for Wattle Day, Adelaide City Council Archives 100 City Gardener-Town Clerk Adelaide 23 August 1915 TCO 2598/15 Adelaide City Council Archives 101 Ibid 102 City Gardener-Town Clerk Adelaide, Wattle Day League-Planting 17 August 1915 TCO 2598/15 Adelaide City Council Archives 103 `WATTLE DAY PREPARATIONS The Register 6 September 1915 104 Ibid 105 Ibid 106 Ibid 107 `THE ALIEN QUESTION’ The Advertiser 1 December 1914 108 `WATTLE DAY/An Historic Occasion’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 109 Ibid 110 Local identity Mrs Pauleen Ween, who was born in a house in the South West quarter of the city, recalls the hubbub when the bigwigs came to town. She herself did not attend the event. 111 `WATTLE DAY/An Historic Occasion’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 112 `WATTLE DAY/The Design’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 113 `WATTLE DAY/An Historic Occasion’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 114 `WATTLE DAY/Scene of Peace’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 115 `WATTLE DAY/Three Generations Linked Together’ The Register 8 September 1915 p11 116 J Winter Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning op cit 1995 117 See Chapter 4 `Imperial Pro-Consul’ in C Cunneen Kings’ Men George Allen & Unwin Sydney 1983